Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Meredith was particularly important to me. My mother had christened me after Diana of the Crossways and I had once seen the very beautiful old writer, supported by two attendants, in my mother’s morning-room. When I wrote to him for his birthday (thank God there is no record of what I set down) he answered in his hieroglyphic hand:

  Let the younger Diana know that her good wishes come to me like the break of the cloud throwing sun on a wintry day. And if by chance she should happen upon Crossways, may she have an index within to direct her whither the right one leads.

  On my birthday came his Poems I and II with this less happy inscription:

  Lady Diana Manners: her book.

  But if she my muse had been

  Better verse she would have seen.

  This and a photograph (immediately hung over my bed) sealed my vows of adoration. In 1909 he died. I blush now to think how I carried on. It seems extraordinary that my family encouraged me. They must have, for my mother lent me her own black clothes (to the ground) with a large black hat. Thus attired, accompanied by Podgie and carrying a treasure-armful of purple irises, we took the train to Golders Green and I saw to my sickening horror George Meredith carried in a small casket by his daughter. It was lowered into the grave and I must needs fling my flowers upon it. Broken with salt tears I was supported back to the special train, where a little dark gnome put his head through the window saying “All you can du for him now is to be a gude girl.” It was J. M. Barrie. I am quite certain that I was not conscious of showing off or attracting attention. I remember my emotions too vividly, but what onlookers of this mawkish exhibition must have thought fills me with shame to this day.

  It was a maudlin phase. A letter to Patrick Shaw-Stewart is nostalgia without a past:

  Then to bed in this deserted Woodhouse, become through cold and misery a home of regrets and memories. This was Patrick’s room, this Julian’s, this the road we travelled in the dead of night to the earthly goal of cherry-brandy-drinking with Harry Cust and Charles Whibbles [Whibley] at Matlock Bath. There the swing without the Grenfells. “I feel chilly and grown old.”

  I am getting very muddled with dates, but these memories jostle around 1908 and 1909 when I was not “out” but grown up in my own eyes at least and plainish in spite of years of pain from plates to straighten my teeth. I had broken the corner off a front one playing hide-and-seek in the dark (a game forbidden) and crashing into an isolated marble pillar that held a lamp. My mother had renounced going to the Delhi Durbar “in case the children break their front teeth,” she had said. It was a poor return for her sacrifice. I was by no means slim in spite of the punchball and the banting, yet I was happy and hopeful (in spite of unaccountable fears and glooms), absurdly ambitious for love and admiration, God-fearing but a little shaken in faith, which had not surged in my soul as I had hoped it would. Confirmation I had dreaded, because to talk of God to anyone but oneself was taboo. Even the word God stuck in my throat, as I feel it might have in Mr Knox’s outside his pulpit. To be instructed about the unmentionable appalled me. Canon M’Cormick of St James’s, Picadilly, was asked to prepare me at the age of fifteen, but I received nothing spiritual from his honest talks. I learnt the Catechism, said I believed (which I did nearly always) and he told me that God had a book with Lady Diana Manners written in it, and that my sins and my merits would be marked beneath and above my name—steps to Heaven or Hell. He was a good man but no evangelist. The Bishop of London blessed me in St Paul’s Cathedral with a lot of other bewildered girls in white.

  Naturally good until now, I had never lied, for nothing tempted me to lie except fear of wounding and I had nothing to fear. But now with the advent of the young men—benign serpents—came the apple. Though it was never offered or nibbled, I felt guilt at my pleasurable excitement, and a practice of deceit began—hidden letters, denial of hand-holding (my mother felt strongly on this score) and many little lies to save her disappointment in me. I felt that it was for happiness, and the only difficulties of the untruths were the crimson blushes and fears of detection. Childhood was over.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Coterie

  “ONLY one year before I’ll be out-and-out ‘Out’.”

  It was a happy year, a lot of it spent writing letters to the swains. I have been re-reading and re-living these old letters written and received, all carefully tied together with sensible string in their dated order, interspersed with telegrams, postcards from abroad and even dinner-cards: “Will you take in Lady Diana?”

  My own letters I find difficulty and shame in reading. It is dreadfully facetious stuff, half written in quotations from poems—“Richard is not the captain of my soul,” “Yesterday, when I saw you in that little moment mercifully given.” No one dies—they “outsoar the shadow of their night.” Girls who yield to love have been “taken with a sigh.” I don’t seem able to speak of the Odyssey without mentioning its “surge and thunder” or of a great house except as a “stately pleasure dome.” They are shockingly solicitous of admiration and “dewdrops” (compliments), and both writer and reader lose all dignity in their passionate prayers for letters and more letters and today and quickly. Those from Patrick Shaw-Stewart, whom I had found at Brancaster, tell of his life till its heroic end in 1917. They describe his years at Oxford working for his examinations—Greats, in which he got a First, and later for All Souls—his life at Baring’s, his delightful pre-war holidays in English houses and in his native Scotland, his loves and changes of love, his fidelity and his interest in my education, the whole campaign in Gallipoli and his last months in the trenches of France. These letters, in his neat, scholarly hand, have moved me to tears and laughter and admiration and tenderness. They clamour shamelessly for more and more of my silly, extravagant scribbles, which clamour too, and nearly always abjectly. This odious little glutton writes in 1908:

  Send immediately detailed dewdrops and don’t tease me by saying you heard them without saying what you heard. They are only crumbs, and I’ll never get enough to make a loaf big enough to grow vanity-fat. The older I grow [I was fourteen] the more unquenchable my thirst for dewdrops.

  What shall I read Homer in? More grown up than Church, not so grown up as Chapman. Butcher & Lang? You say.

  A typical ending reads:

  I’m sorry, darling, you must forgive but I fear never forget the stupidity of your loving Diana.

  There are P.S. injunctions never, never to show my letters to others. I see why only too clearly. I was spinning too many plates unskilfully and was in terror of letting one lapse. I realise now what a strong influence this doomed group of young men had upon me. Yet in spite of wiles I was not fickle and loved them all truly till their death.

  In the year 1910 many of us were lured into acting a tableau play written by Mrs Alfred Lyttelton about St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins. I represented a thousand of them. Cynthia Asquith, in her radiant quattrocento beauty with her heavy gold hair falling to her knees, was the young saint lying in her Carpaccio bed, visited by Mrs Patrick Campbell in angel’s wings. This pretty, foolish performance was given several times and the young men roared applause from the boxes of the Court Theatre and sent us prima-donna bouquets and baskets. It was my first stage experience and I was to have no other till twelve years later.

  Mrs Campbell I loved to distraction. I saw no beauty in her because she was always telling us she was “older than God.” She had beautiful hands that liked giving. I see them fondling her horrible little griffon Pinkie-Ponkie-Poo, and snatching necklaces from her neck to put on to mine.

  It was in the February of 1911 that Letty married. Ego Charteris had been a lot to Belvoir and Arlington Street, and Letty and I went often to Stanway in Gloucestershire where his family lived. Letty, we knew, was very much in love, but love was more secret in those days. It was not talked about easily, even to one’s nearest sisters and friends—not in our family, at least. So we speculated and hoped and fretted and thought wishfully. When they became
engaged the whole family cried for joy. Of all men Ego was the nearest to a knight of chivalry, but there is no echo of laughter from the Round Table, while Ego’s humour was a riot of fine flowers and herbs. No one had such flavour, or such humility and philosophy.

  It was our first wedding—St Margaret’s of course, and of course the bridesmaids were Floras from La Primavera in blossom-strewn dresses with rosy wreaths and veils. Veils were “the thing” for bridesmaids—no more hats. Sometimes they were blue to be like love-in-the-mist, and the wreaths could be flowers or appropriate myrtle.

  Letty looked radiant. Her beams lit us all as we sped them off in a shower of rose-petals over the cobblestones of home to a honeymoon in Morocco. She wrote from Africa en-raptured with Tangier, diffars, the Prince Menebe, rides to the Harris Villa, and the Biblical clothes.

  I had lost my playmate to her love and I could not have wished it otherwise. Marjorie and I in consequence were growing ever closer. I found it hard to remember that all my life she had been first a fearsome stranger and then an awe-inspiring exemplar, for now she and I were of the same age and understanding—not of the same temperament. Marjorie was the stuff genius is made of, and suffered the weight of it. She taught me much, including melancholia—though not, alas! her philosophy, nor yet her arts. She had a crowd of suitors, but her heart had been given many years before to the man she was to marry, and in spite of the changes of fortune and the chances and obstacles that Romance or Eros weaves, designed like a ballet to separate the lovers and hinder and obstruct the happy ending, she never tried to take it from him. Everyone of our age was marrying. I never thought of my own marriage except as of a far-off day that could not disappoint.

  The stage became ever more closely woven into our daily life. My father had brought us Maxine Elliott as a glorious present. She loved both him and his family. In her house near London she gave us dazzling fun. Country-house tennis was at its most vigorous. There, at Hartsbourne, was the champion Tony Wilding taking infinite pains to improve my game—with no success. There were Lord Curzon and Lord Rosebery, both seduced by Maxine’s eyes and wit. There was the most beautiful of all young men of his day, Lord Rocksavage. “We see a lot of Rock. I think he’s probably Apollo—anyhow some god.” He was proud and aloof and loved to dance the one-step (something quite new) to Maxine’s gramophone. There, never-to-be-forgotten, I drank my first cocktail. Cherry brandy was the pink basis and it had a sugared edge and something floating, and I gulped it down behind my mother’s back, and so delightfully amusing were the taste and the daring and the anticipation that I gulped another one and went reeling in to dinner, all my old fears allayed, confident, in high humour, ready for the world and whatever it gave. I remember today the sensation as vividly as that night, countless years ago, when I discovered an ally that I have never quarrelled with. Tipsy, I floated round in Lord Rocksavage’s arms, dancing those innocent steps that were barred at smart dances. It was during the years when one still said to partners who asked you to waltz “Do you reverse?” and before the Austrians had taught us to be spinning tops.

  I don’t suppose Lord Rosebery knew I was tipsy nor yet Lord Curzon. They were both very fond of me. Lord Curzon had once given us three sisters twenty pounds apiece. I had never been tipped more than a pound and it seemed le gros lot. We all bought antiques.

  He used to invite me with my mother to his very elderly parties at Hackwood, made up of the “Souls” and Cabinet Ministers, with their wives or the ladies they loved. They strolled, high-heeled, with parasols on the lawns, through the aisles of beeches, but I was a stranger in age so was not too happy. It was there that I was rude unwittingly to Mr Balfour when playing some guessing game after dinner. Over-keen, I suppose, I shouted “Use your brain, Mr Balfour; use your brain.” It was one of many stories told against me, but to make up for my remorse for pertness Lord Curzon chose me in another game as his hypothetical companion for a journey because I was “both gentle and vivacious.”

  Harry Cust was naturally my rock in this “old sea.” I had known him from earliest Hatley days. He was our “familiar,” an evergreen olive tree, classic, fresh, tender and funny, easily convulsed with silent laughter. Very beautiful, I thought him, with noble hands and impeccable filbert-shaped nails. He wore a coat such as I never saw another wear—dark blue cloth, flaring full, short with a flat sable Eton collar. It was like Holbein’s Ambassadors.

  These Hackwood parties were composed of the “Souls,” but I did not know them as such. Only later did I hear this group of intelligent, cultured men and women, who knew how to live and love and serve and savour the best, referred to as “Souls.” Headlines in cheap papers called me “a Soulful daughter of a Soulful mother,” and my mother would tear the page in pieces. To her the name was pejorative, but not to me. They were mostly admirable and grew to be famous. Harry Cust was a cherished “Soul” and a man I loved with all my heart. His promise was never fulfilled—too soon he wearied of ambition, too soon he died for me to realise his wonderful worth. I clung to him at Hackwood and walked through the beech-groves and capped quotations and giggled over our fellow-guests.

  Our own Coterie was to be composed of children of the “Souls”—the Grenfells, Listers, Asquiths, Homers, Trees, Charterises, Tennants and Herberts.

  I do not know how it came to be the Coterie—the “Corrupt Coterie,” to give it its full title. As a name I am a little ashamed of it, as my mother was of the “Souls.” There was among us a reverberation of the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Baudelaire and Max Beerbohm. Swinburne often got recited. Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink and unashamed of “decadence” and gambling—Unlike-Other-People, I’m afraid. Our peak of unpopularity was certainly 1914 and 1915. But criticism, jealousy and disapproval were all forgotten in the catastrophe.

  In 1910 King Edward had died. The Belvoir bell tolled from dawn to dusk. I had seen him only at Garden Parties in a very tight frock-coat, jovial, top-hatted and cigarred. My mother loved him loyally though he said she never brushed her hair. I had been so long an undetermined débutante, contented to be neither out nor in, that I must have been asked to Buckingham Palace garden-parties before presentation. We were often taken as children to smaller parties at Marlborough House. My mother’s nonpareil of beauty had been Queen Alexandra and she saw her still as radiantly beautiful. She told me that when as a shy young girl she was asked to dance, she would say “I’d rather look at the Princess of Wales, thank you.” If asked to supper she said “Thank you, I’m not hungry,” and “I’m not thirsty” to suggestions of lemonade or tea. I went to dances only in our own house, where one man at the piano played for great ladies in tiaras and for boys and girls to dance. It was not thought essential for plain or pretty daughters to have a coming-out dance. I emerged reluctantly at the dreariest of hunt balls near Belvoir. We drove (about twelve of us) in the Belvoir bus. The horses took an hour each way and there was no pleasure in it.

  But the summer brought a Coronation and a London at its most brilliant. Not that the balls were half as elaborate as to-day’s. Derby, Lansdowne, Londonderry, Bridgewater and Stafford Houses were all magnificent, gilded and marbled, and not to be tampered with. There was no imaginative bedizening, no floodlit trees, temples or ruins, no flowery merry-go-rounds and swing-boats or statues made of moss erected for a night. Marquees there were—uncompromising red-and-white-striped tents and discreet fairy lamps twinkling red, white and blue along the grimy garden paths. It didn’t look in the least like fairyland, though we always said it did. Florists were ordered to bring suitable begonias and smilax to edge the stairs and sprawl over dinner and supper tables. A crude blaze of electric-light bulbs from chandeliers and sconces did nothing for the beauties and robbed the fabulous crowns and jewels of their smoulder and sparkle. I remember no candles except on dinner-tables. At supper there were quails, too fat to need stuffing, and chaud-froids with truffle designs on them, hot and cold soup, lobsters and strawberries, ices and hot
house peaches. It never varied. The Queen of Beauty was Lady Curzon.* When first I saw her at Devonshire House I knew it could be no one else. She wore a turquoise crown on the small golden head that flowered proudly on her long throat. Another Helen, I thought, for she had the proportions of Venus. The elderly ladies all danced with dear old prancing partners, jangling with orders and decorations and with coat-tails flying. Gambolling does not go with weary faces and unlimber limbs. Quadrilles and Lancers were better suited, though no one ever mastered their intricacies and, except at Court, they generally ended in chaos.

  The young girls were raw and shy, innocent of powder and on the whole deplorably dressed, with their shapeless wispy hair held by crooked combs. They must wear gloves drawn above their elbows, and which of us could afford a new pair nightly? So the not-so-clean were worn and we often reeked of cleaning-petrol. Shoes were of pink or white satin and were smudged after the first dance by clumsy boys’ boots.

  We poor creatures suffered great humiliation, for between dances we joined a sort of slave or marriage market at the door, and those unfortunates with few friends or those who had been betrayed by a partner, or were victims of muddling the sequences of their dances, became cruelly conspicuous wallflowers. Those who found such shame unendurable (and I was one) could only sneak downstairs to the cloakroom, ostensibly to have their dress mended, and hope not to meet fellow-wallflowers in the same predicament. The mothers sat all round the room encouraging or glaring at their daughters’ partners. They loved it, and were loath to go home.